Community Antenna Television (CATV) Systems enable subscribers to receive an enhanced signal carrying television programs broadcasted on standard television channels, typically over cables connected to viewers receivers, for improved program reception. As an adjunct to the broadcast of publicly available programming, CATV operators have offered pay TV services wherein subscribers are supplied with additional channels of TV programming, not publicly available, in return for payment of a periodic (usually monthly) fee. Still another type of CATV service offers subscribers special program broadcasts such as first run movies or live theater plays and shows on a one time basis for payment of a single fee.
In order to provide one time viewing services, it is necessary to be able to selectively enable and disable the apparatus which provides to each subscriber's television receiver a signal suitable for viewing. As this cannot be feasibly done by having a technician from the CATV operator visit the subscriber's home before and after each program is viewed to perform the enabling and disabling operations, since it would be extremely costly, other methods of restricting access to TV programs are necessary. One approach to overcoming the need to send a technician to a subscriber's home is to enable and disable the subscriber's access to programming by remote control through the transmission of enabling and disabling signals to each subscriber's residence by complex transmitters and receivers and intermediary connecting lines. The apparatus required to accomplish remote control is complex and expensive and can only be feasibly used where there are a large number of subscribers among whom the costs of the equipment can be amortized over a period of time. The initial start-up costs for assembling such a system and the uncertainty of the number of subscribers who can be expected to participate has discouraged smaller CATV operators from providing single program viewing services.
It is also known that a magnetically encoded ticket or record means can be used to actuate a switching device for energizing an electrical mechanism such as an electrically operated gate for permitting access to a building or a depository in a bank. Such tickets, however, do not lend themselves to use for limited subscription television viewing since they can be re-used indefinitely and, hence, once supplied to a subscriber provide no way of limiting the time during which TV access permitted by the ticket or record means can be obtained.